Late Night Fireworks

I know I'm quickly becoming an old curmudgeon, but if you have dogs, you know that fireworks went off well into the wee hours of the morning this weekend. A reader pointed out that Pennsylvania law allows fireworks as late as 1 a.m. the morning after July 2-4 and December 31, and that checked out. Those are the state's default hours unless a municipality adopts stricter rules. For those of us in Stroudsburg and East Stroudsburg, our municipalities do not have their own consumer fireworks hours on the books, so the state's 1 a.m. rule applies there by default.

However, other municipalities in the area are stricter. Pocono Township, covering Tannersville, cuts it off far earlier: consumer fireworks there are only legal from 4 p.m. to 10 p.m. on July 4. Mount Pocono Borough caps it at 11 p.m. So, in a county where, as Mark Twain reportedly once said, “common sense is the least common of the senses,” perhaps we should take another look across the entire county.